Nightborn (Fantasia Film Festival 2026)

We kick off our Fantasia 2026 coverage with the return of the director behind one of our favourite recent genre debuts. Hanna Bergholm’s name may not leap off the page, but her feature debut Hatching certainly did, striking a blend of body horror and coming‑of‑age allegory centred on a young girl who discovers a mysterious egg in the Finnish wilderness. Bergholm returns this year with Nightborn, which has already been acquired by Shudder and stars Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grint. Saga (Haarla), and Jon (Grint), are a newly married couple who hope to start a family and have moved into a house she’s inherited from her grandmother, but this being a horror movie, things don’t go quite that smoothly.

Where Hatching explored the passage from childhood into womanhood, Nightborn continues Bergholm’s interest in horror built around distinctly female experiences – this time focusing on early motherhood. In one of the year’s hardest and most graphic editing transitions the baby Kuura arrives, but he has all the worst traits a newborn can have. Babies can be born with body hair, but not like this, and with Kuura never sleeping, biting, and screaming endlessly, it quickly becomes clear this isn’t just a difficult child, but something supernatural. When his restlessness escalates into outright danger, he can only soothed by blood – a fact Saga discovers when he nearly bites her nipple off during breastfeeding and begins drinking from the wound. Her grandmother’s warning that cold metal is the only thing that keeps “them” echo through these events, along with the very unsubtle encroachment of the forest upon their lovingly restored homestead.

Structurally, Nightborn is a curious movie that has the concepts and delivery of a horror movie, but its moment‑to‑moment storytelling leans into ambiguity, and from scene to scene it often plays like a heightened domestic drama about a couple struggling to cope with their newborn. From a real medical standpoint it could be said that Saga suffers from post‑partum depression and an inability to emotionally connect with her child as, whenever Jon’s present, Kuura appears perfectly normal – if unusually restless and extremely sensitive to sunlight. This clash of perspectives taps into one of the most persistent themes in body‑horror and body‑horror‑adjacent storytelling: gaslighting. It’s an awkward position for Nightborn because the movie wants Jon to be an unsupportive figure, while simultaneously being a genuinely decent man with a loving family behind him (UK comedy icon John Thomson is great in a small role here). While Jon does overcorrect Saga too much, it’s not malicious, but the misguided eagerness of someone who wants to be fully involved in raising their child.

There’s a deliberate vagueness to the character conflict as Saga is both a reliable and unreliable narrator, and as violent incidents and disturbing discoveries continue to happen solely to her, she becomes increasingly aggressive toward Jon. That tension, together with the uncertainty over whether we’re witnessing a supernatural horror or the fracturing of a new mother under immense pressure, is entirely the point. Without spoiling how things develop, Bergholm condenses the entire early experience of motherhood into a heightened 18‑month period, amplified by Kuura’s animalistic tendencies, and by extension Saga’s own shifting behaviour. It’s an effective ambiguity for most of the movie, right up until the ending when Nightborn finally introduces the concept of fae creatures – a revelation that arrives a little too late to feel fully integrated, but does offer a clear supernatural interpretation of “leaving the nest” that, intriguingly, reframes the story’s domestic turmoil.

Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grint are wholly excellent, with Grint continuing the fascinating renaissance shared by several of his fellow Harry Potter alumni. Jussi Rautaniemi edits with creative verve, and Pietari Peltola’s cinematography captures the double entendre in Bergholm and Ilja Rautsi’s script beautifully – while also being beautiful in its own right. Nightborn is strong, even if it isn’t quite as idiosyncratic or exciting as Bergholm’s debut, but as a horror‑drama so laser‑focused on the bodily and emotional realities of womanhood, it feels destined to divide audiences. Sure, the horror crowd is more progressive and open‑minded than most fandoms, but they’re also slow to embrace movies like this. It’s a fate similar to Michelle Garza Cervera’s Huesera: The Bone Woman, and while Nightborn will absolutely find its audience, it just might not be the wide one it deserves.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – NIGHTBORN